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June 5 - June 8, 2024
There is a theological term, theodicy, that names the painful mystery of how God can be powerful and good and still allow bad things to happen.
When suffering is sharp and profound, I expect and believe that God will meet me in its midst. But in the struggles of my average day I somehow feel I have a right to be annoyed.
It’s not enough to merely want to be more content or to tell myself to cheer up. I need to cultivate the practice of meeting Christ in these small moments of grief, frustration, and anger, of encountering Christ’s death and resurrection—this big story of brokenness and redemption—in a small, gray, stir-crazy Tuesday morning.
Repentance is not usually a moment wrought in high drama. It is the steady drumbeat of a life in Christ and, therefore, a day in Christ.
We confess that we have sinned “in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone,” that we have neglected to love God with our whole hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves.4
Confession reminds us that none of us gather for worship because we are “pretty good people.” But we are new people, people marked by grace
Our communal practice of confession reminds us that failure in the Christian life is the norm.
the word of absolution: “Almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen you in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep you in eternal
“Don’t we receive forgiveness from God, not a priest?” Why use a go-between? I told her that forgiveness is from God, and yet I still need to be told.
God searches more earnestly for me than I do for my keys. He is zealous to find his people and to make them whole.
Christian worship is arranged around two things: Word and sacrament.
The sacraments, for most Protestants, are baptism and Communion, also called the Eucharist.
These two central acts of worship, Scripture and Communion, are compared to my bowl of taco soup, my daily bread. Both are necessary because both, together, are our nourishment.
Of all the things he could’ve chosen to be done “in remembrance” of him, Jesus chose a meal. He could have asked his followers
Christ is our bread and gives us bread. He is the gift and the giver. God gives us every meal we eat, and every meal we eat is ultimately partial and inadequate, pointing to him who is our true food, our eternal nourishment.
“to say grace before a meal is among the highest and most honest expressions of our humanity. . . . Here, around the table and before witnesses, we testify to the experience of life as a precious gift to be received and given again. We acknowledge that we do not and cannot live alone but are the beneficiaries of the kindness and mysteries of grace upon grace.”
This moment of pause before my meal conditions me to learn to eat such things as are set before me, to receive the nourishment available in this day as a gift, whether it looks like extravagant abundance, painful suffering, or simply a boring bowl of leftovers.
Instead of the focus of worship being that which nourishes us, namely Word and sacrament, the focus became that which sells: excitement, adventure, a sizzling or shocking spiritual experience.
Powerful spiritual experiences, when they come, are a gift. But that cannot be the point of Christian spirituality,
Word and sacrament sustain my life, and yet they often do not seem life changing. Quietly, even forgettably, they feed me.
How should we respond when we find the Word perplexing or dry or boring or unappealing? We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread. We wait on God to give us what we need to sustain us one more day. We acknowledge that there is far more wonder in this life of worship than we yet have eyes to see or stomachs to digest. We receive what has been set before us today as a gift.
Christian worship, centered on Word and sacrament, reminds me that my core identity is not that of a consumer: I am a worshiper and an image-bearer, created to know, enjoy, and glorify God and to know and love those around me.
But God knows the harvester of these beans and cares about justice. And God has made us not merely to consume but to cultivate, steward, and bless.
eating itself reminds us that none of us can stay alive on our own. If you are breathing, it’s because someone fed you. We are born hungry and completely dependent on others to meet our needs. In this way the act of eating reorients us from an atomistic, independent existence toward one that is interdependent.
God’s shalom—a very pregnant word that means God’s all-consuming, all-redeeming peace.
I am increasingly aware that I cannot seek God’s peace and mission in the world without beginning right where I am, in my home, in my neighborhood, in my church, with the real people right around me.
Early Christians took seriously Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5 that if someone is approaching the altar and remembers that their brother has something against them, they must leave and go make peace with the offended brother before offering a gift to God. So before the meal of peace, we speak peace to those nearest us.
She is practicing the truth that the extension of peace is vital to worship, that worshiping God is inextricably tied with seeking God’s kingdom of shalom by making peace with her neighbors. Through her church community, my daughter is being trained as a peacemaker.
when we seek peace, we begin where we are.
Each time we make a small choice toward justice, or buy fair trade, or seek to share instead of hoard, or extend mercy to those around us and kindness to those with whom we disagree, or say “I forgive you,” we pass peace where we are in the ways that we can.
And God can take these ordinary things and, like fish and bread, bless them and multiply them. He can make revolution stories out of smallness.
poverty is not simply a lack of money. It’s a lack of community, a lack of deep ties—family, friends, people you can count on, people to catch you when you fall.
We can become far too comfortable with the American status quo, and we need prophetic voices that challenge us to follow our radical, comfort-afflicting Redeemer. But we must also learn to follow Jesus in this workaday world of raising kids, caring for our neighbors, budgeting, doing laundry, and living our days responsibly with stability, generosity, and faithfulness.
We’ll have to keep forgiving all day, every time we think back to our argument, every time we’re tempted to pick up the sword again. Peace takes a whole lot of work. Conflict and resentment seem to be the easier route. Shorter, anyway. Less humiliating.
forgiveness and reconciliation cost us. We have to struggle long and hard for it, through time and tears.
When we have been wounded by those around us, extending forgiveness—“not counting their trespasses against them”—is giving up our right to recompense, to resentment, to self-righteousness.
Our forgiveness and reconciliation flow from Christ’s forgiveness of us.
Out of gratitude over the enormous debt our king has forgiven, we forgive our debtors. Receiving God’s gift of reconciliation enables us to give and receive reconciliation with those around us.
It is not a peace that plays nicey-nice, denies hurt, or avoids conflict. It is never a peace that is insincere or ignores injustice. It’s a peace that is honest and hard-won, that speaks truth and seeks justice, that costs something, and that takes time. It is a peace that offers reconciliation.
We cannot seek peace out of our own strength. We all blow it—we fail those around us, we pass judgment instead, we retreat into selfishness as often as we extend a hand. If we are ever peacemakers, it is not without a good deal of war within our hearts.
“prayer after communion” or the “prayer for mission” that we say together each Sunday: “And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord . . .”
benediction and are told to go: “Let us go forth in the name of Christ,” or “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”1
There is no competition between the work we do as a people in gathered worship—liturgy means “the work of the people”—and our vocations in the world. For believers, the two are intrinsically part of one another.
The work we do together each week in gathered worship transforms and sends us into the work we do in our homes and offices.
The Christian faith teaches that all work that is not immoral or unethical is part of God’s kingdom mission.
The kingdom of God comes both through our gathered worship each week and our “scattered” worship in our work each day.
“vocational holiness.”8 The idea is that we are sanctified—made holy—not in the abstract but through our concrete vocation.
Each kind of work is therefore its own kind of craft that must be developed over time, both for our own sanctification and for the good of the community.
Our task is not to somehow inject God into our work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our vocational lives.
I want to do the big work of the kingdom, but I have to learn to live it out in the small tasks before me—the missio Dei in the daily grind.
